The award recognizes the group’s work on the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) proof of concept, part of DTCC’s multi-year Corporate Actions Transformation initiative, which was designed to standardize and streamline corporate actions processing and provide an efficient, cost-effective platform that benefits all market participants. XBRL is a technology standard used by every public company for financial statement reporting. It is based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) which is a standard that enables data to be tagged for easy identification.

“The collaborative spirit of the XBRL working group has resulted in process improvements that benefit all parties in the ADR corporate action event announcement chain,” said Dan Thieke, DTCC Managing Director, Settlement and Assets Services. “XBRL has reduced risk and enabled DTC to announce the events to our clients much faster than previously possible.”

The Inside Reference Data Awards, presented by Inside Market Data and Inside Reference Data, are voted on by financial institution professionals who recognize industry excellence in a variety of data areas, including corporate actions and the delivery of corporate actions data.

The use of XBRL enables DTCC subsidiary, The Depository Trust Company (DTC), to automate the highly manual work stream involved in the receipt of dividend announcements. Benefits of increased automation include ease of, which helps firms reduce risk, enhance efficiencies and drive down costs related to corporate actions processing.

The XBRL taxonomy is aligned with ISO 20022, enabling a higher level of automation because DTCC can convert the message to ISO 20022 for the real time announcement to its clients. DTCC is the first to generate ISO 20022 messages for corporate actions, which represents a significant step towards standardizing corporate actions data throughout the industry and aligning it with market practice.

In the past two years, the DTCC transformation team, with the participation of several clients, has piloted and launched ISO 20022 announcement messages and supported the onboarding of additional users to the ISO 20022 platform. DTCC has also begun electronic testing of ISO 20022 messages covering the full entitlement and allocation lifecycle for distribution events.

DTCC’s Corporate Actions Transformation initiative will ultimately replace many proprietary systems with the new browser based interface and numerous proprietary file transmissions with ISO 20022 messages. DTCC will begin to retire corporate actions proprietary file formats at the end of 2015.